Robert Cringely asks why Macs aren’t more popular in business, and in particular why people adopt Linux machines in place of Apple’s lovely XServe boxes. He thinks it’s a conspiracy – that sysadmins are concerned that Macs are so easy to use that they’ll be out of a job. I doubt it. I don’t think people deliberately make their lives harder to keep themselves employed; not often, anyway.

I suspect it’s just that Macs, for most, are an unknown quantity. You can try out Linux almost for free while to try out a Mac server costs a bit more. Apple should offer some ‘sale or return’ scheme.

And secondly, I think the traditional divide between Mac and Windows has been big enough that people don’t think of buying a Mac as a file/web/mail server for PCs, a task it ought to be able to perform just as well as a Linux box. I’m thinking of trying this soon…

Type a mathematical expression into the search box in Safari (or any similar Google-enabled program) and you get the result. Works for simple stuff like ‘1.4 *2.2’ but also understands some quite fun stuff: